On a muggy July night in 2017, Pinegrove guitarist Nick Levine was stabbing a hot needle of indeterminate origin into my flesh. I was getting my first stick-and-poke tattoo. The design was a single square. Sitting next to us on the hardwood floor of a bedroom in Kinderhook, New York—a small, sleepy country town a few hours north of Manhattan—was Evan Stephens Hall, the band’s frontman and primary songwriter. We were at the spacious, light-filled house where the members of Pinegrove had been living and recording. Hall was giving himself a much poorer version of the same tattoo. The unassuming shape is a loaded one for Hall. “It’s very hyper-aware of narrative layers,” he said, delineating the logic of the square, or frame, in between spiritedly mumble-singing along to the Spice Girls’ “Say You’ll Be There.”

Technically, these were not Pinegrove tattoos. A Pinegrove tattoo is two intersected squares, like a cubic Venn diagram; the band’s iconography also includes an ampersand, and both symbols are inked to Hall’s inner bicep. They are meant to indicate an ethic of tolerance and coexisting perspectives. The squares featured prominently on the cover of Pinegrove’s 2016 breakthrough, Cardinal, and in that album’s wake, the band began retweeting dizzying numbers of kids with identical Pinegrove tattoos. They retweeted quoted lyrics and fan art and endless bedroom-recorded covers of their earnest songs. At least one fan wrote a high school English paper analyzing Pinegrove lyrics. These young people called themselves Pinenuts. In their honor, Hall put a line about Pinegrove tattoos into a new song called “Rings”: “I draw a line in my skin,” he sings, “I’m pinning down inchoate meaning.”

Though Pinegrove’s sound hews closest to alt-country-flecked indie rock, it is sometimes labeled emo, and this affiliation makes sense: Their music is open-hearted, communal, earnest, lyrical, with a discernible ease, and Cardinal was released on the emo-aligned Boston label Run for Cover. It bears the influence of Gillian Welch’s gleaming twang and the angularity of early Death Cab for Cutie. If you are someone who grew up on emo before getting into supposedly more “sophisticated” artists, you could hear your whole musical coming-of-age packed into a Pinegrove track. Their signature song peaks with a line about calling your parents and telling your friends that you love them.

But the rabid obsessiveness of Pinegrove’s youthful fanbase was the most emo quality of all. Those tattoos felt cultish and symbolic—of empathy, of aliveness, of artmaking in general—as if denoting a more tender but no less radical update on the Black Flag bars, as if each square sung that timeless mantra: Our band could be your life.

Once, I admit, I considered searing those two squares into my skin. Pinegrove’s songwriting had come to represent, to me, a positive force within our ever-awakening music world. Where the pop-punk subculture of my youth could be hostile to young women, I saw something like true progression at Pinegrove shows and in their Twitter stream. They defied the all-white-male image of so many emo-adjacent bands and pushed progressive politics; by January 2017, they had donated over $21,000 in Bandcamp sales to Planned Parenthood and released an album, Elsewhere, to benefit the Southern Poverty Law Center, the civil rights advocacy nonprofit. Whether emo or indie, Pinegrove were compellingly thoughtful; they pointed in a better direction.

I had gone to Kinderhook in 2017 to report what I thought would be a fairly triumphant profile of Pinegrove as they worked on their new album, Skylight. The band had already fulfilled the promise of DIY self-manifestation, having formed in 2010 around two lifelong friends, Hall and drummer Zack Levine, in their suburban hometown of Montclair, New Jersey. They had played music together since childhood and spent years roughing it on self-booked tours, playing to no one, subsisting on personal convictions.

In Kinderhook, I paced across some springy fields with Hall while he philosophized about the practice of “peripatetic discourse” (that is, walking and talking at the same time). I listened to him muse on the genius of Elena Ferrante. We caught sight of monarch butterflies and deer.I sat around while the band—Hall and Zack Levine, plus a rotating cast of Nick Levine, Nandi Rose Plunkett, Adan Carlo Feliciano, Sam Skinner, and Josh Marre—recorded music and made tacos. I observed while they scrolled through drafts of Hall’s semi-surrealist tweets and decided which to publish to the band’s account.

From the time Hall picked me up from the train, with Loretta Lynn on the speakers, he had also been excitedly confessing about a musician he had recently met and become infatuated with. They had just spent several days hanging out—even duetting on his favorite song of all time, “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”—and Hall had stayed up all night writing a song about her, which he played for me and his bandmates. He said he ought to be honest: She would no doubt be occupying his mind throughout the duration of my trip. Hall was an open book, an intellectual chatterbox, a compelling storyteller. His personality met the honesty and high-wire energy of his songs.

I still went for just the one square on that July night. Perhaps it was my own ingrained skepticism, but even in the summer of 2017, true Pinenut ink already felt too daring for comfort. I knew not to put that much faith in a male public figure, even if his songs have saved you.

On November 21, 2017—at the height of the watershed #MeToo movement—Hall wrote a strikingly long, puzzlingly vague message on Pinegrove’s Facebook page acknowledging that he had been “accused of sexual coercion.” The statement described a “short but intense” relationship with an unnamed woman, and it carried an apologetic but defensive tone—not least of all when Hall attempted to rationalize his behavior by noting, “i believed all of our decisions to be based in love.” Following his opaque chronicle of the relationship, he also wrote that he had once said he “could sense who from the crowd would be interested in sleeping with me based on how they watched me perform.” The statement ended earnestly—“i have never felt remorse like this before”—but it raised a monumental number of troubling questions and answered few.

After posting the statement, Hall did not deflect responsibility. In accordance with the alleged victim’s wishes, which were communicated to Pinegrove via a mediator, the band began a year-long hiatus from touring. Hall entered therapy. Skylight was shelved. A band who once prioritized clear and open communication went completely silent.

The mediator clarified to me that, in this case, the alleged sexual coercion took the form of “verbal and contextual pressure” and that “the accusation is not of a physical nature at all.” The alleged victim requested that she remain anonymous in public discourse and declined to speak with me on the record for this piece.

Hall’s statement was only the beginning of a story that has persisted, this year, in finding new ways to unravel. As an April report by SPINrevealed, the statement and ensuing fallout was instigated by a series of emails from the Philadelphia-based organization Punk Talks, which purports to connect touring musicians and music industry workers with free therapy. Their motto: “You don’t have to be sad to make great music.”

Sheridan Allen, 27, founded Punk Talks in 2015, after she received bachelor’s degrees in social work and sociology from Northern Kentucky University, where she also completed graduate courses involving intimate partner violence and forensic interviewing as part of a child welfare program. On November 14, 2017, Allen emailed Pinegrove’s label, Run for Cover, and the promoters of a Cleveland, Ohio festival called Snowed In, which the band was set to play on November 25. In the email, which was obtained and reviewed by Pitchfork, Allen wrote that she was moved to reach out after speaking with an alleged victim of Hall’s, with whom she had connected via social media. “In the wave of people in influence being called out for dangerous behaviors,” she wrote, “I was approached today concerning Pinegrove.”

Allen proceeded to describe Hall’s “predatory and manipulative behavior toward women attending Pinegrove shows and women he has been sexually involved with.” She stated that the alleged victim was “NOT THE FIRST” (emphasis hers) to tell her as much. She shared her belief, “as a mental health professional,” that Hall should “step away from music to receive intensive treatment.” She noted that the cancellation of Pinegrove’s tour and album release would be “nearly impossible to do without making a public statement,” though she did not specify who ought to write such a statement. Allen offered to speak with Hall herself and also suggested that Punk Talks could offer him “rehabilitation services.” She copied one of the organization’s licensed therapists on the email for “further guidance or clinical direction.”

But even by sending that initial instigating email to Pinegrove’s label and promoters, Allen was possibly overstepping her boundaries. If Allen’s mission was to facilitate mental health treatment, then, as one licensed therapist told me, it would be unusual “to offer that service and then also be engaging in these unofficial accountability processes.” Mental health support is a markedly different resource than a community-based accountability process. “It would be incongruent with the mission [of a mental health provider] to approach this person and say, ‘You’re a perpetuator,’” the therapist told me. “If a therapist is going to engage in reparative accountability work, that would be extremely confidential. Everyone would be consenting to engaging in that.”

Two days after Allen’s email, in an internal update sent to the Punk Talks team, she wrote that if Pinegrove did not step away from playing so that Hall could enter therapy, “the original victim and another identified victim plan to speak publicly, which we support 10000%.” She added, “I hope you will stand with me on this, it has not been an easy time working directly to take down the biggest band in indie right now and I am very tired.” (Five months later, Allen walked back those comments on Twitter, writing that Punk Talks “are not and will never be in the business of ‘taking down’ bands; this was a poor choice of words on my part and not an indication of the work we do.”)

Allen had been approaching her effort from a few angles. According to Snowed In promoter Cory Hajde, Allen first contacted him to vaguely say that someone came to her “outing Evan as an abuser.” He considered removing Pinegrove from the festival, but without concrete details, Hajde said, he was “legally obligated” to keep the band on because they were in a contract. Allen pressed on. Hajde said she then proposed the idea of telling the opening bands on Pinegrove’s upcoming tour, Adult Mom and Saintseneca, about the allegations in an effort to cancel the shows. Hajde declined to intervene. “I think she felt like she had something to gain, which was very bizarre,” Hajde told me. “I felt bullied by the way she was talking to me throughout the whole process.”

Steph Knipe, who performs as Adult Mom, is a trusted queer feminist voice in underground music. Knipe told me they received a text from Allen a week before their scheduled tour with Pinegrove, warning them about an issue with the tour but offering few details. “She put me in a weird position,” Knipe said. “A lot of people, myself included, don’t have the tools to know how to deal with situations like this. I was under the impression that Sheridan was a licensed therapist or social worker or counselor. Sheridan—coming from [Punk Talks], saying, ‘I’m trained to deal with this’—was basically abusing that safety, which made it doubly confusing and hard. When I got that text, I was like, ‘Oh thank god, this is exactly what we need in a situation like this—this will be handled really well!’ And it wasn’t.” Knipe said Adult Mom ultimately decided to cancel their dates with Pinegrove after they spoke with the alleged victim directly.

Fellow opening act Saintseneca arrived at their decision similarly, according to band leader Zac Little. The same alleged victim, who knew a member of Saintseneca, contacted the group to say she had been sexually coerced by Hall. “We took this account seriously and decided to withdraw from the tour,” Little told me. The morning after Adult Mom and Saintseneca dropped off—just a week after Allen’s first email—Hall posted his statement; Pinegrove canceled the tour.

But the alleged victim, it turned out, did not want her allegation to be made public. “Sheridan Allen did many things without my knowledge, support or permission involving the Pinegrove situation, even after I had already asked her to remove herself entirely from the situation,” she wrote in a statement to SPIN earlier this year. “I never asked for her to request or demand any type of statement from Pinegrove or Run for Cover. I’ve never said or implied to Sheridan that I wanted to ‘take down’ Pinegrove.” Allen inserted herself in many ways, she continued, “without my knowledge or consent.”

When I reached Allen via email—she declined to be interviewed by phone—she said she knew of the victim’s wish for the situation to remain private, which is why she emailed band affiliates “rather than putting Evan or Pinegrove ‘on blast’” via social media. She denied asking Pinegrove to make a statement. “There was no motivation other than to help a survivor move forward from their trauma,” she wrote.

In her email to Punk Talks staff, Allen mentioned a second “identified victim” of Hall’s. That person was—in Allen’s mind—Autumn Lavis, a Phoenix-based organizer and educator who has helped run an organization called Safer Scenes, which traveled on Warped Tour teaching bystander intervention to bands, crew, and fans. “I have been a victim of sexual assault and I have spent years working to make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else,” Lavis told me. “But my involvement with Evan wasn’t like that.” Lavis and Hall first met in the summer of 2016. They had a brief, intimate relationship that, Lavis said, ended when Hall got back together with an ex-girlfriend. “The aftermath made me feel bad about myself,” Lavis said. “But I never felt that he was abusive towards me at all. If someone did have a negative experience, I want to validate that, but mine was consensual.”

When the hurt of their relationship was still fresh, Lavis said she vented to Allen, who was her friend at the time. In the fall of 2017, Allen contacted Lavis to discuss Hall again. “She kind of made me feel worse about the situation,” said Lavis, who grew concerned when she saw a screenshot of Allen’s internal Punk Talks email circulating. “I asked Sheridan if she was referring to me [as a victim], because I had a strong feeling, and she said yes. I told her that I felt like I was misrepresented. She was apologetic. But it didn’t fix the situation.” (Allen confirmed to me that Lavis “was absolutely misrepresented in this email,” adding that she “misunderstood their interactions” and takes “full responsibility” for the error.)

“I felt it was invalidating,” Lavis said, “not only towards me as someone who has been sexually assaulted, but to other people who have as well.” Lavis is in school to be a teacher, where she studies restorative justice—the idea that a perpetuator can reconcile with the community. “In that email, Sheridan was talking about ‘taking down Pinegrove,’” she said. “Restorative justice doesn’t look like that. It’s not a vendetta.”

Before they became entangled in turmoil, Allen and Hall had actually been mutually supportive of one another. They met in April 2016 at a Pinegrove show in Columbus. Pinegrove were reaching the end of a nearly two-month tour; they made $100 per night and drove themselves around in a Ford Windstar. According to Hall, Allen told him about Punk Talks and said, “If you ever feel like you want somebody to talk to, you can talk to me.” Hall was unaware that Allen was not a licensed therapist. “I was like, ‘Awesome—being at the end of a seven-week tour, I could really use someone right now, if you have a minute,’” Hall recalled to me this year. “She said, ‘sure.’”

According to Hall, they then went to the Pinegrove van; he sat in the driver’s seat, Allen in the passenger’s seat. “I confirmed confidentiality, and she said, ‘Of course, only if you’re a harm to yourself or planning harm to others would I say anything,’” Hall said. “Which is of course invoking a therapeutic context. I understood us to be having a session.” (Allen did not recall the specifics of their conversation.) Allen later checked up on Hall via text, and Hall referred a friend to Allen.

Hall claims that Allen represented herself as a therapist and used confidential information from their session in her original instigating email, which he felt “violated” by. Hall comes from a family that valued therapy, he said; his mother was once a social worker and the director of a women’s shelter. Allen denies offering Hall therapy. “I did not at any point act as Evan’s therapist,” Allen wrote, calling their initial conversation only “personal in nature.”

But others besides Hall told me that Allen represented herself as a therapist, and Allen referred to herself as a “professional therapist” on Twitter this April. When asked whether she ever represented herself as a therapist through her work with Punk Talks, Allen responded, “I have referred to myself as a therapist because, at that time, I was working as a therapist under the supervision of an individually licensed professional. I tried my best to make it clear to everyone that interacted with [Punk Talks] that our therapists are individually licensed and that I am not licensed to practice therapy independently.”

Allen, who’s currently working to earn master’s degrees in social work and nonprofit management, acknowledged that, “I made egregious errors and mistakes throughout this situation. I was acting without any guidance or a board and I have done absolutely everything I can now and in the future to ensure adequate checks and balances, as well as ensuring this will never happen again.” Punk Talks has since assembled a board of directors, which Allen says she formed because she felt “unprepared” to handle the Pinegrove situation.

Punk Talks and Pinegrove are now equally embroiled in a story that has no doubt perpetuated harm from both sides. It has become an almost gross magnification of the cultural moment we are living through, in which social media call-outs stand in for real resolution, when situations that ought to be accounted for in private are haphazardly made public, when definitions of consent are only flimsily and selectively applied, when what we believe as right or wrong feels impossibly far from what we might ever know as true or false.

It is our inclination to cancel people, to nullify them. This makes some sense, particularly when consideringthat this burdensome question—What do we do with people who cause harm?—so often falls onto people who have themselves been harmed. “I know that casting people off is not a permanent solution. It doesn’t really fix anything,” Adult Mom’s Knipe told me. “But the way to heal is to get this person out of your sight.”

In some sense, I related. After reading Hall’s perplexing statement, it was my instinct to abandon this Pinegrove piece. But to ignore the story ultimately felt like a denial—of nuance, of truth, of the complications of the world we live in now, where these stories are objectively not all the same. “Everyone is capable of hurting other people… it’s just very ingrained in our behavior,” Knipe said. “And that’s why talking about it and accountability processes are so important.” In the wake of these newly public traumas, the conversation—the forum, the hearing, the entangling narrative threads—is profoundly crucial. It might be all we have.

A year after my initial visit, I went back to Kinderhook this summer. The house was more lived in: Records were on the shelves, studio soundproofing had been built out, and Hall showed me a sizable plant named Orlando, after the Virginia Woolf novel. In a dining room, the stuffed toy monkey that once served as the band’s mascot on tour sat on a shelf presiding over the table where Hall, Zack Levine, and I talked for four hours.

The year has been still for them and it showed. Hall’s demeanor has calmed; he’s grown his hair out. Since late 2017, both the band and the alleged victim have focused on coming to a private resolution via a trusted mediator. Until that resolution was reached, Hall said, “there was really no way for us to offer any clarification” to their fans. It was the alleged victim’s request that Pinegrove take a year off from touring and that Hall enter therapy. “We wanted to honor that,” Hall said. “She recognized that we’ve honored it, and has since approved our plan to release an album and play some shows later on this year.” (Their mediator confirmed this.)

The uncertain extent to which Hall was being accused of abuse has now loomed over Pinegrove for nearly a year. That uncertainty is due to the absence of the alleged victim’s voice as well as the fact that sexual coercion, the term Hall used in his statement, can take many forms. The mediator elaborated on the alleged victim’s account: “She and Evan had a brief relationship, and she was in a relationship when it started. She felt that he coerced her into cheating on her partner with him, and she felt that she said no to him several times... and he continued to pursue her.” Hall maintained that their relationship progressed mutually but acknowledged the alleged victim’s “right to describe her experience however feels true to her.” He added, “I definitely could have conducted myself better.”

Hall has spent the year reflecting, reading, taking walks. He started skateboarding at a nearby park. He said he has been listening to “Kacey Musgraves and drone music exclusively.” He is attending therapy weekly in Montclair and has generally tried to slow down. He said he has been thinking about how consent applies to all relationships, about how to “live more democratically” among peers. “This situation has demanded a full re-inventorying of myself,” Hall added. “I’ve tried to approach that with humility and with focus.” He said the band never considered breaking up.

Being off the road has been crucial since, as Hall put it, “Touring a lot prevents you from dealing with your emotional ecosystem because it’s so demanding and decentralizing.” Hall has been reading Canadian novelist Rachel Cusk, more Ferrante, and the intersectional feminist writer bell hooks’ 2000 classic All About Love—a book that has been especially helpful in the #MeToo era as we collectively search for answers in the wake of so much public trauma. hooks promotes living by a “love ethic” over a “power ethic,” and emphasizes the necessity of open and clear communication in achieving that. When I asked Hall what he has learned from it, he mentioned hooks’ definition of love as “actions that nurture the soul of another person or yourself,” the fact that “patriarchy promotes dishonesty,” that “love is incompatible with abuse.”

I asked Hall about how his perspective has changed since the day he posted his statement to Facebook last November. “At first, I felt defensive. I was trying to understand what the accusation was. It really didn’t jive with my memory of what had happened,” he said. “I take consent seriously. All of our encounters were verbally consensual. But, OK, certainly this isn’t from nowhere. If she came away feeling bad about our encounter, feeling like she couldn’t express how she was feeling honestly at the time, that’s a huge problem. So I have been reflecting a lot about how a relationship that promotes honesty is an active process, and that maybe there are conversations we should have had that we didn’t, or maybe there’s something else I could have done to make her feel like she could have said how she was feeling. I’ve been thinking about that all the time.”

Of his chosen language in the statement, Hall said, “A lot of people took issue with the phrase ‘sexual coercion,’ because they understood it was evasive, like I was obscuring a more serious accusation. But I included that phrase because that was the language used by the person I was involved with. It was meant as a symbol of respect to have her dictate the language of the conversation. In the context of our relationship, she felt that I had sometimes pressured her into having sex—not physically, but verbally and contextually.”

Hall characterized the statement as a direct response to what he calls the “elevated and inflammatory language” of Allen’s email, which he said “felt like a threat.” For Hall, the notion of an alleged second victim “contributed to me kind of spiraling out, like, ‘Holy shit, if there are multiple women who have complaints about me, maybe I’ve been completely delusional.’ I was really trying to address that possibility.” It put him in a headspace of “paranoia and fear.” “I was responding very specifically to one person,” Hall said, referring to Allen. “I wanted to appease them. I don’t know. I was not thinking clearly, and I said some things that I can’t totally stand behind.”

Hall spent three days mulling over the statement, with one day and night of focused writing. He said he has “probably 100 drafts” of thoughts in his phone. Hall and Levine enlisted the guidance of trusted friends and people on their team, but the statement was ultimately their doing, or as Hall put it, “something we really need to own.” No one tried to stop them. “I mean, I remember my mom being like, ‘Are you sure you have to do this?’” Hall recalled. “And I was like, ‘No. I don’t know if I have to do this. But a lot of people are telling me that I do. And I think I do. I wanna do the right thing. I’m not sure what it is.’”

Hall said he included the part of the statement about how he “could sense who from the crowd would be interested in sleeping with me based on how they watched me perform” because it was mentioned in Allen’s email, and he felt compelled to address everything brought up against him. According to Hall, that line was based on something he told the alleged victim once in private. “I was noticing people act towards me in a certain way, from the audience,” Hall said. “And then those same people would sometimes approach me at the merch table or in person after the set, and be very directly solicitous, or proposition me. This was an observation based on a correlation. I was not objectifying people from the stage.”

I told Hall that, when I read the statement in November, it seemed to insinuate that he had sexualized fans in the crowd. He clarified, “I categorically do not target fans for sex. Nevertheless, I understand why reading what I wrote would make people reflect on their experiences at our concerts through an uncomfortable lens. And I’m so sorry to anybody who read that and felt uncomfortable. When I really think back about the statement, the languageis just so dissonant and horrible. It’s not ever what I’ve meant to convey. We have always prioritized the safety of fans at our concerts, and we always will prioritize the safety of fans at our concerts.”

If he could do it all over again, Hall said, he would make the statement shorter. “I’ve gotten into all sorts of trouble throughout my life just not knowing when to stop, verbally,” he continued. “Being honest in situations when I’m not supposed to be.” He murmured, “Honest to a fault, I guess.”

For a long time, after posting the message, Hall didn’t look at the internet. When he did, he was destroyed by “the emotional impact of seeing people calling me a rapist, which is not even what I’m being accused of, with such authority,” he said. “Or even seeing people call for my death on Twitter.” While reflecting on his attempts to not internalize it all, he began to cry.

Even so, Pinegrove have not appreciated uncritical support, either. “If the band defended ourselves, it would have required us to basically be representing ‘the accused,’” Levine reasoned. “We’re not looking to defend that group of people.”

“We don’t want listeners who are like, ‘We don’t care about this sort of thing,’” Hall added. “We care about this sort of thing. I’m way more sympathetic to people who are like, ‘I don’t understand this situation, it seems fucked up, fuck this band,’ than people who are like, ‘I don’t understand this situation, fuck this situation, I love this band.’ We are thoroughly in favor of the dismantling of patriarchal structures, and the movement right now to elevate survivors and victims of abuse. And we are not interested in a listenership that doesn’t care about that.”

As the only woman in Pinegrove, Nandi Rose Plunkett had a singularperspective on Hall’s situation. (A multi-instrumentalist, she left the group’s full-time lineup at the end of 2016 to pursue her own project, Half Waif, though she still performed on Skylight; she is currently engaged to Pinegrove’s Zack Levine.) Plunkett made her support of her bandmate clear: “I do not think Evan is at all a threat to young women attending shows,” she wrote via email. Plunkett added that she has had “many productive conversations privately” about the allegations against Hall, but said it has felt “daunting” to speak in public. “Still, I’m hopeful that the space is beginning to open up for these challenging conversations,” she said. “I want any young female fans and fellow musicians to know that I’m fighting for them. I’ve dealt with a lot of challenges as a multiracial woman and I’ve been thrust now into the middle of a situation that I never imagined I’d be a part of. But I’m learning a lot from it, having tough conversations and pushing myself and those around me to dismantle the structures of privilege that have built and bound us. In order to grow into a more loving and understanding community, we have to work towards healing through sensitive and open communication. And that’s what we’re trying to do.”

Pinegrove plan to release Skylight on September 28, though they will be putting it out themselves. The band was not dropped from Run for Cover, according to label head Jeff Casazza. But according to Hall, there was “some discomfort expressed” from other artists on the label about Skylight’s release, spurring the mutual decision. (Pinegrove plan to work with a different label in the future.) The band will donate all proceeds from Bandcamp sales of Skylight to three charities: the Voting Rights Project, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and Musicares, which offers mental health resources to musicians among other services.

The album’s cover features a pale blue square inside of a navy one. Hall said Skylight has not changed in any significant way since it was recorded in mid-2017, which gives it an eerie prescience. Its opening lines find Hall committing, “I draw a line in my life/Singing this is the new way I behave now.” And then there is the ecstatic “Intrepid,” which wonders about “what type of world we wanna live in” and what might happen “if we learned to love ourselves better.”

Skylight’s stark centerpiece, “Thanksgiving,” is perhaps most uncanny of all considering how closely the fallout overlapped with that holiday a year ago: “Warm night before Thanksgiving/What do I have to be nervous for?” On the album’s closer, the pedal-steel weeper “Light On,” Hall pleads, “I wanna do much better.” That same sentiment echoed throughout Hall’s Facebook statement, and I was so befuddled that the song was completely written before the public Pinegrove reckoning—as all of the lyrics on Skylight were—that Hall had to remind me, “The same person who wrote the statement wrote that song.”

Pinegrove made its name on a song called “Old Friends.” The Cardinal opener is, in its three and a half minutes, a song about ambition, defeat, introversion, autonomy, happiness, humility, love (platonic, romantic, familial), and the complex familiarity of home. Its central lines, however, are purely a matter of life and death. They form what Hall calls “a summary of what we’re about… the logical conclusion.”

I saw Leah on the bus a few months agoI saw some old friends at her funeralMy steps keep splitting my griefThrough these solipsistic moodsI should call my parents when I think of themShould tell my friends when I love them

It sets a mood: vulnerability, introspection, compassion, severity. “It’s about saying what you mean and having the confidence to say it,” Hall explained to me in July 2017, sitting on the floor of his Kinderhook bedroom. “There was someone who was an acquaintance—a friend of a friend, really—that died in a very sudden and tragic way. It was an accident. I had always sort of distantly had a crush on her, but I had never taken the time to really get to know her. We don’t have much time. So why do we withhold our true feelings? Why are we playing it cool?”

“Old Friends” reminded Hall of his dim, dusty bedroom in Montclair, where he would spend long, lonely afternoons in his mid-20s, without direction or purpose, smoking weed and staring at the mess on his floor. “I was coming from a pretty dark place,” he said. “This moment shook me out of that. Eventually I imagined my way out. I was just writing a song that I needed.”

In 2016, I needed it, too. I was already obsessed with Cardinal by that fall, when I learned that an old friend of mine had died. The friend and I had been on uncertain terms for many years, and I was devastated by the realization that we would never fully reconcile. I listened to “Old Friends” as a reminder to never let that happen again. It really was one of the only things that helped.

I was mourning a deeply complicated relationship. It had ended, mostly, with an instance of sexual harm that nauseates me to mention; with me cutting him off, him getting help, and surfacing, years later, to apologize. I really felt he had changed. I half-heartedly accepted the apology, and carried on with my life. The relationship ultimately made me see and feel—with a gravity that has staked itself into my heart—the entanglements of mental illness, addiction, predation, and depression.

We bring ourselves to music; it’s the only way. The song is there, but so are we, processing it in tandem with our personal inventories, the rolodexes of pain and trauma and fortitude and joy that make us the people we are. When clarity is in short supply, we still have the agency to think our way through. Our experiences dictate what we are comfortable with, what we can possibly forgive, and what we cannot accept.